Wednesday, April 22, 2015

MSNBC Screening: Just Eat It

Tom Colicchio was just announced as MSNBC's first food correspondent. And he, and MSNBC invited us to an event for their first food documentary Just Eat It. You can imagine how delicious that sounded. And so we trudged out on a rainy Monday night to ... no reception. Brian Flood of TVNewser put it best:

"MSNBC invited us to an advanced screening of the film Just Eat It, followed by a conversation moderated by celebrity restaurateur and MSNBC food correspondent Tom Colicchio. The foodie in me envisioned piles of the famous Crispy Bacon from Craft, or at least mounds of the Duck Pastrami Pot-Au-Feu from Colicchio & Sons.

"It took about 30 seconds upon arrival to realize there would be no bacon. No tables filled with fancy cured meat. Not a snack in the entire place. See, Just Eat It actually promotes quite the opposite. It’s a film that details how much food is wasted in America each year."

True that. My growling stomach aside, the documentary was quite astonishing. Some stats: 40% of US food ends up in landfills. 4% of oil produced in the US goes towards producing food that is wasted. Americans throw out the equivalent of $165 billion in food annually.

Filmmakers Grant Baldwin and Jenny Rustemeyer decided to spend 6 monthswithout buying groceries at supermarkets in the traditional manner. It is amazing, as the documentary proceeds, how easy it is to find food if you are crafty enough. It is also amazing how much food -- perfectly good food -- is tossed out that is perfectly edible. There is even an "ugly fruit" campaign for fruits and vegetables that are not perfect and thus cannot be sold at supermarkets.

Just Eat It makes its debut on MSNBC tonight 10 PM EST. Watch it for Earth Day.